Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 771

Chapter 771: Living Mountain

They turned south.

For half a breath, the range was quiet. The evacuation horns had stopped. The monsters had all moved past. The only sound was wind across stone.

Then the mountain stood up.

Rivers shifted. Valleys buckled. The entire face of the range slid sideways as something enormous rearranged the ground beneath it.

There was no warning.

One moment the range was a range, peaks and ridges and the familiar silhouette that Kaiden and every member of his team had been climbing and fighting across for weeks. The next, the peak they had used as a navigational reference for the entire competition, detached from the range.

It stood, and the scale refused to fit inside Kaiden’s head.

His mind kept trying to apply normal reference frames and failing. Building, guild tower, skyscraper - none of the words worked. The thing that rose from the range was measured in kilometers. It had four legs that had been, moments before, the surrounding peaks. It had a back that had been an entire ridgeline. The stone that had covered it in the guise of a mountain sloughed off in house-sized boulders as it straightened, cascades of rock thundering down its flanks to flatten the forests below.

Six eyes parted along the crown of its head in a slow, staggered cascade, like lanterns being lit on a cathedral. Each one was the size of a small settlement, lit in a hue that should not exist in natural light. Vertical slits for pupils, irises of a deep glassy black threaded through with veins that pulsed like mana and weren’t. They did not blink. They opened, and the moment they did, the sky above the range turned the wrong color.

The mouth followed, a jagged fissure along the front of what had been a peak, splitting wide in a ragged line that didn’t move the way a mouth should move. The edges were stone and flesh, weeping a dark mineral fluid that hit the forests below and set them alight. Inside was a deeper blackness, a swirling pressure.

It screeched again.

This time Kaiden was ready, and it didn’t matter. The wave crashed over his team and the range and the valleys beyond with a pressure that flattened grass, shattered boulders, drove every one of his girls down to one knee. Alice’s halo flickered hard. His teeth rattled.

And from the mouth, they came.

They poured out of it like the thing was a gate rather than a creature. Glasswing Darters first, a cloud of them in a glittering swarm so dense it blotted out a quadrant of sky, wings too large, bodies doubled in mass, the crystalline panels threaded through with the same dark veins that pulsed in the mountain’s crown.

Mirecrawlers behind them, flying now. Mirecrawlers weren’t supposed to be able to fly. A Shellback Gorger with a wingspan Kaiden couldn’t measure. Three of them. A half-dozen Embermaws trailing fire from new wings, leaving smoking lines across the wrong-colored sky. A Cragweaver the size of a small guildhall, eight wings, one per leg, of course.

He knew all these monsters, having faced them before. But it was as if they’d been upgraded, evolved, granted wings and increased power.

And the things he had never dared to fight before.

A spine-studded giant half again larger than a Shardhorn Colossus, glassy growths along its ridge pulsing in time with the crown above. A lean, loping predator on six wings with a face he couldn’t hold in his mind long enough to name. Something that might have been a Fissure Render’s older brother, uncoiling from the mountain’s maw with fangs wet and wings dripping.

They came out wrong. Empowered and winged and warped in ways the originals hadn’t been. And they kept coming.

The mouth did not close. The creatures did not stop.

"Mortals of Earth. It has been exactly ten years since the shattering of your world. Ten years since mana graced your meager existence, flooding your fragile sphere."

"You’ve been granted ten years of reprieve. Ten years of coddling."

"Today, I herald the decade-long grace period’s conclusion."

"Survive and thrive... if you can."

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